First, Wii. After almost 600 days on the market, shipments are just shy of 30 million. How does this compare to previous console champ PS2?

Worldwide, Wii is 10 million ahead of where PS2 was at the same age. However, PS2 had a staggered launch, with it releasing in Europe about 8.5 months after it did in Japan. How does Wii compare in each of the major regions?

And Wii takes a slight lead in Europe. It's also worth noting that historically Europe hasn't been a strong market for Nintendo. This is the first time any of their home consoles have shipped 10 million there. Yes, including NES (8.56 million) and SNES (8.58 million).

You might ask, "I thought Wii was breaking sales records all over the place. Why is it staying so even with PS2 in this count?" Two things come to mind. One is that these old PS2 numbers use Sony's old method of reporting shipments, which was really a measure of "produced and shipped to our warehouses". This inflates them some unknown amount from a "shipped to retailers" type of shipment like these Wii numbers (and modern Sony numbers) use. The other is that, simply, the sales we look at from Famitsu or NPD or wherever themself are imperfect, and their methods do change over time. Measures of PS2 in 2000-2002 could be more or less accurate than measures of Wii in 2006-2008.

Changing gears to DS. The historical comparison in this case is to its predecessor the GBA.

As you can see, DS shipments nearly match GBA's shipments, in much less time. Unless next quarter is a big drop from this one, expect DS to overtake GBA at that time.

One thing that's interesting to note, though, is the very different way the portable systems have been spread worldwide.

Over half of worldwide GBA shipments went to North America. Europe was a distant second, with Japan in third.

DS, on the other hand, is spread out much more evenly worldwide. Each region has spent at least some time in both first, second, and third place. Currently it looks like Europe is pulling away.

So we've looked at how these two systems have performed compared to their historical competition, but how do they compare to each other?

Through about seven quarters of each, Wii has a healthy lead of what appears to be about 7 million. Wii is actually ahead of where DS was after its eighth quarter. Wii's quicker takeoff probably owes a lot to the big success it took DS 1-2 years to find.

I'll close with an image and phrase that I've become a bit known for by this point: "There are more Wiis available than any near-launch home console ever." We're not so near launch as we were when I first said it, but hey. Not much else to say about the image; Wii and PS2 were already discussed earlier, and nothing else compares to them.